Larry Elder Blasts 'Odd Duck' Rand Paul for Telling Blacks Cops Are Out to Get Them

Calling Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) an “odd duck,” conservative talk radio host Larry Elder accused Paul of needlessly fueling the notion that cops are out to get black people.

On Tuesday’s The Laura Ingraham Show, Elder, after saying that he was as libertarian as Paul but disagreed with his foreign policy views, said of Paul’s recent inclusion efforts, “I get the idea of making sure the Republican party is embracing black people and trying to attract black people, and he is coming to the inner city and giving speeches to the degree that most prospective republican nominees would never do.”

“I get all that, but to lend fuel to this notion that ‘cops are out to get us’ is undermining the very effort,” Elder said, noting that after George Zimmerman was acquitted, Jesse Jackson said, “blacks are under attack.”

Elder asked, “by whom?” He pointed out that there are “7,000 black homicides last year, almost all of them at the hands of another black person.” He said that in Chicago, there are at least ten homicides a week – “almost all of them unsolved.”

In a Timeop-ed last week after the Ferguson riots, Paul said that “it is almost impossible for many Americans not to feel like their government is targeting them,” and “given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.”

“Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention,” he argued. “Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth.”

Elder said that Dr. Martin Luther King has gotten “us to the point where, pretty much, we can be evaluated by the content of our character to a degree that has never been done in all of human history” in what is the “fairest, most free, most prosperous nation in all of human history.”

“And we’re sitting around bitching and moaning and whining about officers like Darren Wilson?” he asked. “For crying out loud…”

Elder said that if Ferguson residents do not like their white power structure, they should “get out and vote” to change it. He wondered how many blacks in Ferguson would even apply to be police officers after being incessantly told that the police represent “the man” that they should be against.

He cited the late UCLA political scientist James Q. Wilson, who co-introduced the “broken windows” theory of policing in an article in The Atlantic during the 1980s. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani subscribed to Wilson’s theory, and Ingraham pointed out that was the difference between Giuliani and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Elder noted that it was Wilson who also said that the chances of someone becoming poor are greatly reduced if “you finish high school, don’t have a kid before you’re 20, and get married before you have that child.”

“If you follow that prescription you will not be poor,” Elder said. “If you don’t, 90% will be poor.”